I started contributing to OSM recently after a bike trail was built near me. The arial imagery typically takes years to refresh around here so I walked it a few times to capture GPX tracks and then drew the new path. It was exciting to see my contribution percolate out to various apps that depend on OSM, and meanwhile Google and Apple have both ignored my edit suggestions and deny the path exists.
So I have a fairly fresh newcomer's perspective and here's what I suggest to get started: keep it simple and start local. As others have noted, skip the complex mapping app and go straight to the website for feature edits, or download a simple mobile app like Every Door and focus on businesses and landmarks near you. Go on a walk around your neighborhood and look for old/incorrect/missing businesses. There may be errors near you about places you actually care about, and it is really gratifying to fix those.
There were restaurants near me that were missing, shops that had changed hands, etc., that were easy fixes but years overdue. I captured some basics (names, posted hours, the phone number posted on the door, etc.) with Every Door, and then later logged into the main OSM website and fine-tuned the entries. I got into a pattern of fixing one or two entries every evening when I went out for a walk and pretty soon my walking route was all up-to-date. Then I started paying attention to things like stop signs and cross walks and found a whole new kind of little, incremental edits that nobody else was doing.
It's been fun, I've made useful contributions, and my laptop is still Java free.
Every Door is definitely one of the easier ones and I like it but dang I wish the dev could get more funding to make it a nicer UX. Between the glitchy raster tiles and need to click load data all the time I feel it gets tiring fast.
I've considered building a separate app that's similar but oriented around the idea of using voice of pictures to update things (with AI extracting and formatting the data for you to review). But alas making yet another tool isnt ideal.
Isn’t that a door (haha) opened by our supreme new AI coding overlords: that now it’s possible to take the Every Door source code (it’s on Github), and throw it into a coding agent with the instruction to „improve <ux shortcoming of your choice> without breaking functionality“, and with some iterations and human validation that yes, the UX is now indeed better, play the changes back with a PR?
In a lot of areas the sidewalks and crosswalks aren't mapped even though they show up clearly on overhead imagery. I try to fill them in when I can, although this should probably be an AI task now.
It doesn't help that there are multiple ways to map sidewalks in OSM (as a property of the roads themselves, or as standalone paths parallel to the roads).
I got pretty into OSM for a while and that's definitely the thing that eventually put me off... So much stuff has multiple ways to be mapped, and it gets confusing/overwhelming. I understand that OSM has a very malleable data model, and that definitely has many benefits, especially for niche/edge cases. But I do wish the community had arrived at a settled convention for at least the most basic stuff, like the aforementioned sidewalks.
I mainly chose JOSM for this tutorial because of its filter. As a beginner (just a few weeks ago), I couldn't figure out how to use iD's filter to show JOSM's equivalent of `name=* ((amenity=* "addr:housenumber"=*) | shop=*) -website=* -"contact:website"=*`. For this tutorial I wanted something better than than "click around the map until you find a place without a website." That felt like it'd be a frustrating and inefficient first experience.
I think your tutorial would have more impact if you had a super short intro making a quick mod using the web page. The existing stuff is excellent for those who get a surge of dopamine from updating the map and want more power and control. The web editor is far from ideal but the app has a greater learning curve. Even installing it can be onerous.
I used the web editor recently to add a street and path and to fix some names. It was about as clunky as the Google Maps web editor which I used for the same updates.
This seems to be a very powerful way to contribute to OpenStreetMap, but I'm not sure if it's the right option for a new user.
I have over 2k contributions and most are from the Every Door app ( https://every-door.app/ ) on my phone.
If adding new data is too "scary", then maybe use StreetComplete ( https://streetcomplete.app/ ) which essentially asks questions about missing or existing old data.
I've added buildings, fixed layouts, etc, but that came later, after I better understood how things work.
Contributing to OSM was super cool. I've had an issue where my home snaps to the nearest road, which is in fact fenced off from us, rather than the road that our cul de sac connects to (which was not well marked in OSM). Last week, I went in and in about ten minutes used the visual editor to paint in the driveway, read a quick wiki page on how to correctly label driveways, and then submitted it. I got a pleasant jump scare the next time I doordashed some food and saw the little driveway squiggles I added on the map in the doordash app, and then again for lyft -- such a cool feeling!
Would highly recommend the web editor -- what's proposed here looks super comprehensive but way more difficult to use for a first timer.
JOSM aside, I think it's great to target people that read HN with this article. They are likely tech savvy and as much as OSM tries to make it easy for less tech savvy folks to contribute, it's just not really feasible without third party apps like StreetComplete. I recently tried to teach my dad, who was interested but completely overwhelmed, even by the iD editor, and the whole idea of the data model. Which is a shame because he knows so much about the area where he lives.
JOSM is great when you get really into, but if it's really your first edit, just use the editor on openstreetmap.org.
If it's something you end up enjoying, one really satisfying thing to do is pick a small rural town and improve the map. With a few hours, it's not hard to make the OSM data more detailed and better than any other publicly available map.
The limit is imposed by the OSM API itself, and it's a matter of how much data is already mapped in the area you're requesting -- a max of 50,000 nodes according the API docs. Of course data density varies wildly across the planet, so you can expect to fetch a lot more acreage in rural areas than in urban ones. But there's no way to know if a particular bounding box call will succeed without trying it out.
Editing software could be generally aware of high and low density locales and advise accordingly. And it could subdivide a large request into smaller ones. But the JOSM developers prefer to offer a closer-to-the-API experience.
As a beginner use the editor built in on the website instead (called ID). JOSM is a great power user tool, but this article's recommendation to use it for your first edit is misguided.
I appreciate this a lot, but I wonder why the first edit is not done on the website itself. This is 15 minutes of work for a single change, while on the website you can do it in a minute.
I've been using the app "StreetComplete" on Android, I have found it to be a really seamless and easy way to add extra details to OpenStreetMap while roaming around.
I recently purchased some very rural land with a cabin that I put on AirBnB. The address is a different road than the driveway is and all the maps took drivers around 1 mile away with no way to find the actual driveway. I had to go through the process of fixing this on Google, Apple, and open street maps. OSM was by far the easiest and my updates propagated within minutes. Google was the second easiest but still took me deep into the “feedback” menu and then a week or two of waiting. Apple was by far the worst as I had to sign up for an Apple business account, upload incorporation docs, and then go through multiple rounds of back and forth with some approval agent.
Another option for apple would have been to just wait for a few months. They are downstream of osm but updates are slow. Likely your "propagated within minutes" was misleading. Almost no app, certainly not a mainstream app your customers might use, is reading osm live. They're all days to months behind on periodic batch updates.
Months behind is not fair. Apps like Komoot, OSMAnd or CoMaps have monthly refresh cycles. Others are shorter and yes there are longer (mostly obscure) update cycles such as apple maps, Uber, https://transportnsw.info/
How does OSM prevent trolling or vandalism? Since many (most) courier companies rely on OSM for their database a bad "joke" could prove very frustrating to many people.
Just like Wikipedia, people follow changes. If there is vandalism, it often gets reverted within a few hours. If there's a mistake (relation broken for example) it can take a few hours longer to fix.
I once encountered a joke building that was so large, I remember in the magnitude of 500km2, that you couldn’t edit it in the web editor. You had to download a desktop application to delete it.
It was in a place of the world that is unlikely to be popular within the OSM community.
One thing to note: OSM edits are associated with your account. Do not use your regular user name, or people can easily identify where you live since people tends to edit nearby locations.
If you accidentally did that, I believe there's a way for the admin to scrub that for you.
I think the complaint is focused on the notion that the instructions tell a would-be contributor what is not OK, and then do not help them to figure out what is OK.
> Determine if any of the search results represent the official website for your place. Do NOT use search results for social media profiles, review sites, or other business aggregators. When in doubt, don’t use it.
This zero-option style of phrasing doesn't leave any room for interpretation.
It's a dumb thing to do too. If you have a website, you control what it says. For a shop or restaurant it's totally fine to just show a nice photo with your name, opening hours, address, and contact details, and just link to whatever social media accounts and reservation/delivery ordering platform you use.
It's also the place that will allow you to inform your patrons when big tech deletes your heavily invested in social media account for some reason.
Not having a normal website means that potential customers who search for you get hit by login-walls for Instagram and Facebook if they're not on it, or 'you need an app for this' with crap like TikTok. It also makes my (volunteer) job of mapping the area around me harder, because I'm most certainly not going to bother to enter any additional info about your business if I have to go to Instagram or Facebook (and in the OpenStreetMap community I'm not alone in that).
Funny enough, Cafe Lolo, the business that the example edit demonstrates, replaced my favorite restaurant in Seattle, Cookweaver. The chef-owner of Cookweaver is now doing private events and in-home meals for folks who miss his cooking: https://www.cookweaver.com/omakase-menu
I was put off by co tributing to osm at first when someone brought up that 300mb java monster application at first actually. Luckily i found there's an online editor and did my first edits there. I would definitely not recommend josm for a newcommer
Is there any software that can take raw footage from 360deg cameras that are now sprolling, identify businesses without websites, opening hours etc, and pre-fill them? With the user only having to validate.
You can actually add a "streetview" level to the editor by adding the mapillary plugin and you can add material for others on the free and independent version: https://panoramax.fr/
it's much easier than that. just go on osm.org, create account, click edit and then ... DONT edit ... but complete the tutorial offered right there ... then edit. anyway, it's fun to keep the neighbourhood up-to-date.
Most likely the parent was relating this to revealing where you live and the privacy aspects.
Yes indeed one could figure out where I went for holidays by my OSM edits but then any FAAG or similar would know that already by any social media interaction I might have had during the holidays.
My bigger OSM edits are rarely during the actual holidays but rather before or after.
So I have a fairly fresh newcomer's perspective and here's what I suggest to get started: keep it simple and start local. As others have noted, skip the complex mapping app and go straight to the website for feature edits, or download a simple mobile app like Every Door and focus on businesses and landmarks near you. Go on a walk around your neighborhood and look for old/incorrect/missing businesses. There may be errors near you about places you actually care about, and it is really gratifying to fix those.
There were restaurants near me that were missing, shops that had changed hands, etc., that were easy fixes but years overdue. I captured some basics (names, posted hours, the phone number posted on the door, etc.) with Every Door, and then later logged into the main OSM website and fine-tuned the entries. I got into a pattern of fixing one or two entries every evening when I went out for a walk and pretty soon my walking route was all up-to-date. Then I started paying attention to things like stop signs and cross walks and found a whole new kind of little, incremental edits that nobody else was doing.
It's been fun, I've made useful contributions, and my laptop is still Java free.
I've considered building a separate app that's similar but oriented around the idea of using voice of pictures to update things (with AI extracting and formatting the data for you to review). But alas making yet another tool isnt ideal.
I got pretty into OSM for a while and that's definitely the thing that eventually put me off... So much stuff has multiple ways to be mapped, and it gets confusing/overwhelming. I understand that OSM has a very malleable data model, and that definitely has many benefits, especially for niche/edge cases. But I do wish the community had arrived at a settled convention for at least the most basic stuff, like the aforementioned sidewalks.
That's less true for niche stuff (vs stuff where two different ideas are in wide use), but there probably isn't all that much of it either.
One way to approach it is to not worry too much about it, consistency can come later.
Using JOSM for your 1st edit is definitely not recommended.
Doing the same with iD (the editor embedded in the OSM website) is faster and there's even a tutorial that will explain a bit about how things work.
I mainly chose JOSM for this tutorial because of its filter. As a beginner (just a few weeks ago), I couldn't figure out how to use iD's filter to show JOSM's equivalent of `name=* ((amenity=* "addr:housenumber"=*) | shop=*) -website=* -"contact:website"=*`. For this tutorial I wanted something better than than "click around the map until you find a place without a website." That felt like it'd be a frustrating and inefficient first experience.
Is there a way to make that filter in iD?
I used the web editor recently to add a street and path and to fix some names. It was about as clunky as the Google Maps web editor which I used for the same updates.
Just use the web page. It works, it's not hard to use and it's immediate when you have the urge and motivation to fix something on a map.
I have over 2k contributions and most are from the Every Door app ( https://every-door.app/ ) on my phone.
If adding new data is too "scary", then maybe use StreetComplete ( https://streetcomplete.app/ ) which essentially asks questions about missing or existing old data.
I've added buildings, fixed layouts, etc, but that came later, after I better understood how things work.
Would highly recommend the web editor -- what's proposed here looks super comprehensive but way more difficult to use for a first timer.
If it's something you end up enjoying, one really satisfying thing to do is pick a small rural town and improve the map. With a few hours, it's not hard to make the OSM data more detailed and better than any other publicly available map.
> The area you tried to downlaod is too big or your request was too large.
And no indication whatsoever of how big the area should be, I'm at my fifth attempt so far.
Editing software could be generally aware of high and low density locales and advise accordingly. And it could subdivide a large request into smaller ones. But the JOSM developers prefer to offer a closer-to-the-API experience.
[0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.6#Retrieving_map_...
It was in a place of the world that is unlikely to be popular within the OSM community.
The larger users of the data are doing some degree of validation of changes before showing them to users.
If you accidentally did that, I believe there's a way for the admin to scrub that for you.
This seems a bit outdated as many restaurants/shops now consider they FB/insta page as their "official" website (or rather lack of).
[1] https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/contact:facebook [2] https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/contact:instagram
> Determine if any of the search results represent the official website for your place. Do NOT use search results for social media profiles, review sites, or other business aggregators. When in doubt, don’t use it.
This zero-option style of phrasing doesn't leave any room for interpretation.
It's also the place that will allow you to inform your patrons when big tech deletes your heavily invested in social media account for some reason.
Not having a normal website means that potential customers who search for you get hit by login-walls for Instagram and Facebook if they're not on it, or 'you need an app for this' with crap like TikTok. It also makes my (volunteer) job of mapping the area around me harder, because I'm most certainly not going to bother to enter any additional info about your business if I have to go to Instagram or Facebook (and in the OpenStreetMap community I'm not alone in that).
Crazy stuff, definitely not for beginners
A foot-carried google street car if you want.
?
mapillary got bought up by meta.
[1]: https://learnosm.org/en/beginner/id-editor/